The real world of fake news

Fake news the phrase of the times we live in. So much sothat it is the one dominant phrase even in the limited vocabulary of a sitting American president. At a recent rally in canada goose black friday sale Montana, Donald Trump said even Honest Abe (Abraham Lincoln) was a victim of fake news.

canadian goose jacket What is truth? Why do we believe in the things we do? Whom do we believe and why? When faced with questions like Canada Goose Jackets these, it is prudent to ask ourselves another question What would Foucault say? canadian goose jacket

canada goose deals Words matter they frame the debate canada goose coats and how we understand the world. He once said, “Not everything is bad, but everything is Canada Goose Parka dangerous. The choice we have to make every day is to determine which the main danger is.” That is the question we are going to address today. When it comes to news and fake news, when do we know which is which and how do we know which is a greater danger. canada goose deals

buy canada goose jacket cheap “Fake” once meant “counterfeit” or “inauthentic,” like a fake Canada Goose Coats On Sale Hussain or a fake birth certificate or a fake driver’s license. These days, it is used to essentially denounce another person’s reality. But “fake news” as a phenomenon is not new. The first newspaper published in North America got shut down in 1690 after printing fabricated information. But the challenges we face in the now, in 2018, are unique and uniquely different, thanks to the rise of technology and with it, the rise of the modes in which information (and misinformation) is generated. buy canada goose canada goose uk shop jacket cheap

Canada Goose online A massive new study conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the journal Science analysed every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence some 126,000 stories, tweeted cheap Canada Goose by 3 million users, over more than 10 years and found that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominated the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. Canada Goose online

The spread of false news stories is sowing distrust, empowering the fringes, discrediting the fourth estate, and poisoning democracies across the world. And that is what we dig deep into today.

Vladimir Nabokov once said reality is the only word that means nothing without quotation marks. He was, of course, making a sardonic point about relative perceptions. But politicians Canada Goose Online have taken the philosophical point about the lack of an “objective truth” and run with it to the polling booths, in the process, creating alternate canada goose coats on sale facts, creating discord hardly seen before.

canada goose coats on sale Richard Nixon may have labelled media members as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” but it would take Donald Trump to tag the media with a name straight out of Stalin’s playbook “enemy of the people.” canada goose coats on sale

canada goose clearance In Canada Goose Outlet a recent development, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, after meeting WhatsApp Head Chris Daniels, said the Facebook owned messaging app has contributed significantly to India’s digital story but it needs to find solutions to deal with “sinister developments” like mob lynching and revenge porn. But let us go back a bit to 2014 when a viral quote was attributed to Meryl Streep on the internet and later it was learnt that the quote summing up a personal disenchantment with inauthentic experiences, was actually first published by motivational figure Jos Micard Teixeira on his social media account. canada goose clearance

buy canada goose jacket There was no particular reason to misattribute the quote except that Streep was better known than Jose and a confessional statement from her mouth was likely to travel faster and so it did. Much before the advent of the internet, tabloids across the world misattributed and even sometimes Canada Goose sale cooked up quotes and even entire incidents to sell copies. buy canada goose jacket

canada goose The internet, in any case, is not designed likea gated community where information, trivial or important can befirst verified and then allowed in. That is its greatest asset and its greatest flaw. canada goose

Hence unverified reports of Princess Diana’s last words and Jennifer Aniston’s secret meetings with ex husband Brad Pitt and other assorted odds and ends have been floating around https://www.canadagoosepark.com for ages because they carry within, the potential of being true even if they are canada goose clearance sale not and canada goose store have a raging curiosity value. But fake news has consequences.

The United States election, anyone? Brexit, anyone? Lynchings here in India, anyone? Even in countries canada goose uk outlet where the media are heavily regulated have suffered canada goose factory sale in the age of fake news. Take China, for example. In 2008, rumours about maggots found in Sichuan grown tangerines hurt sales nationwide in China.

Canada Goose Parka In 2011, following an earthquake and nuclear meltdown in Japan, as the Wall Street Journal reported, unverified messages circulated on the social media platform QQ about the magic power of salt in protecting against radiation and a possible salt shortage, pushing large crowds to grab the mineral from markets. Some rumors even touched high level politics. As The Atlantic reported, in the aftermath of the 2013 trial of cheap canada goose jackets Bo Xilai, a former Politburo member, rumors of a pro Bo coup being in the works spread quickly. Canada Goose Parka

canada goose clearance sale Since eyeballs and shares drive virtual uk canada goose traffic, a lot of stuff is created for cheap canada goose uk clickbaits and usually tailored to tap into the bubbles right at the top buy canada goose jacket cheap of the mass culturecauldron. As academicianSimeon uk canada goose outlet Yates said, the economics of social media favour gossip, novelty, speed and “shareability.” And as has been documented by novelist Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Sapiens”, the one thing that has helped humans stick together is gossip. canada goose clearance sale

Hard news is or should be a different cup of tea. As a media study class will tell us, news at its purest is about the where, how, when, who and why of current events unfolding in all the directions that canada goose clearance we know as north, east, west and south.

Canada Goose Outlet How this news is delivered may or may not have an obvious or latent political slant. A recent article in Scroll went viral as it featured the memorable faces of Doordarshan news who delivered information with a deadpan expression, absolute absence of emotion and the only irrelevantly interesting bit in the broadcast was if Salma Sultan would ever repeat her sarees. And if the rose tucked behind her ear buy canada goose jacket was real or fake. Canada Goose Outlet

Canada Goose sale News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, and also on the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. It is also used as a platform to manufacture opinion for the population.” The last line about manufacturing opinion is at the heart of the rise of fake news in recent times. Canada Goose sale

canada goose store The Telegraph UK noted that “fake news” was not a term many people used two years ago, but it is now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy and free debate. “As well as being a favourite term of Donald Trump, it was also named 2017’s word of the year, raising tensions between nations, and may lead to regulation canadian goose jacket of social media,” said The Telegraph. canada goose store

Canada Goose Jackets And as you know, regulatory measures have already begun to unfold globally and in India particularly in the aftermath of numerous episodes of lynching triggered by WhatsApp forwards. Canada Goose Jackets

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canada goose black friday sale News or something dressed up as news is delivered to us today via not just mainstream media outlets across various platforms but also through websites with no known experience in serious reporting, via viral memes and doctored videos and images that blur the line between the real and the manufactured and at times create paranoia, fear, polarisation and conflict canada goose black friday sale.